Pesantezza: short-story
by Fernanda Cortes

His knees are getting red after rubbing on the floor for so long. The superior layer of the skin is breaking, revealing a new layer of skin ready to be ripped off. You can see how deep it has become because the blood is constant and we are just waiting for his bone to crack. We hope a shriek will come out of his mouth.

It is not that we force him to follow us.  He embraced us and welcomed us, we just like to please him. 

Every time he is having a conversation with our rival, we need to save him. We interrupt in the middle of the phrases; we incubate in the middle of his memories, the secret is to place or remove objects from the image. If he remembers the pleasure of a pendulum  movement during a warm afternoon as a child, we remove the swing. If he remembers the kiss of the first love, her soft skin, her sweet perfume and her eyes close to his, waiting to touch his lips, we transform her skin into sandpaper, her smell becomes rotting cow guts and we remove her eyes.

We are no one. We believe in God and we spit on him. We like to caress him when he is ready to place the sole of his foot on the ground preparing to stand up, but our soft voice will push him down forcing him to crawl. One leg is dragging on the floor, the arm will follow, the other side of the body will copy the previous one and so on, crawling like a baby.

And like all babies, they get tired and need rest. He stays down, he lies on the floor, his mouth is touching the cold floorboards, his hands are glued to his hips, he resembles a rigid object. We know we are loving him at our best. 

In the middle of the silence, his chest starts to move slower and slower. It is evident the air is staying longer in his lungs as if he is trying to preserve it. We are scared. His hands are recovering movement, each of his muscles comes back to support him, this is when our rival seduces him.

He has been repeating this movement for so long: lay down, crawl, kneel down, lay down, crawl, kneel down, lay down, crawl, kneel down. A carved circle created a path, it is the mark of his movements on the floor, creating a beautiful red colour scheme, some of them are bright, this is his fresh blood and the dark ones are the old lacerations.

He hasn’t noticed that on his back a mass of fibrous meat is growing, born from his own muscle, a muscle he didn’t know existed. His shoulder got swollen and after becoming  bloated, the asymmetrical shape of his body seems natural. That accumulation of skin is getting wrinkled and dry. The weight of his right shoulder makes it easy for him to come back to the pavement. We hope another lump will be born soon.

His belly is pushing out because the muscles are exhausted. He doesn't know this, but if he continues it will be permanent. His eyes have the expression of duty more than joy, maybe it is all the agony he can't recognise.

What happened to him? Who is to blame for this? Where is god? But who cares about that because in the end you will join us, like all this time you have been delighting yourself about his misery.